I found these little angels on the face of a well in the classical revival gardens of the Elms, a former summer cottage of the Pennsylvania coal magnate (NAME HERE).  The cottage, or should I say larger-than-life mansion,  became a museum in the late sixties when it was sold by the inheritors of the estate.  The generation the escaped Philadelphia for cool summers in Newport had disappeared and their offspring were now part of a Jet-set headed to the newer trendier vibrant shores of Nice.  

When I entered the garden, I was immediately drawn to the sculpture of the angelic children on the well.   As I focused my camera lens onto their faces, I had an uneasy feeling that I was capturing them in an act more sinister than what I saw with my naked eyes.  They were frozen in the act of playful teasing.  One putto was tearing off the mask of another, revealing an embarrased and vulnerable child.  A third angel watched on the brink of laughter.  I was struck by the irony of their young innocent faces caked dark with mold and grey with corrosion.  I could hear them beckoning me to play me, but I ignored them as if they were a trio of dogs fighting over a scrap of food.  

At that moment the mansion and the well converged in my eyes, they were one in the same.  The mansion with all of its gilded layers was the mask of the coal magnate.  It was his vision of an ideal world.  It was no wonder that this house served as one of the film locations for the Great Gatsby.  A story in which hope and patience are the wealth of the poor and denial and selfishness are the poverty of the rich.  The mansion that I had just walked through was the lens (also director focusing his lens) from which the coal magnate focused his version of reality.  A reality that was filled with masks,   It was a gilded world in which a coal magnate was king and all his guests were subjects of a child's masquerade.